Mentorship and Outreach Materials

Feel free to use and/or reference the following materials I’ve developed for mentorship and outreach. All I ask is you credit me appropriately by linking to this page (lilynzhang.com/teaching/) and let me know if you find them useful!

Intro to Scientific Programming (in MATLAB and Python)

Update: I have finished transferring this course to Python and a Jupyter Notebook format! See: https://github.com/lnzhang-climate/intro-to-sci-programming/

I have developed the following short course in MATLAB to introduce undergraduate students I mentor to the basics of scientific programming. The syllabus is:

• Lesson 1: Introduction to the Terminal
  • Command Line Functions: disp(“hello world”), mathematical operations
  • Creating, Storing, and Using Variables
  • Writing and Running a Script
• Lesson 2: Arrays
• Lesson 3: Plotting
• Lesson 4: Logic

Lessons 2-4 have corresponding materials, which you can access in their original live script form or as PDFs in this Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/19YxVv5Eus7Arhz58atPZmods9LG8SMch

Science and Economics of Climate Change

This course was originally developed as a six-week introduction to climate science and policy for K7-12 students in the MIT Summer HSSP Program. I’ve succcessfully repurporsed various parts of it for outreach and mentoring.

Description: “Climate change is always in the news, but what is the science behind how carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and other human activities impact our climate? What are the economic drivers behind pollution and how successful has environmental policy been in addressing climate issues? 

This class will give you a unique understanding of the climate change issue from a scientific and economic perspective. We’ll explore three different climate change phenomena and discuss how successful different policy instruments have been/can be in addressing each of them.”

Materials: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1x0rQinhErezTG-DcBLkj47P4LxMka2H0?usp=drive_link

Undergraduate Courses

Here are the courses I have or will be TAing for:

• ATM S 211 Climate and Climate Change at UW
• 8.01 Classical Mechanics at MIT
• 8.02 Electricity and Magnetism at MIT
• 11.011 Art and Science of Negotiation at MIT